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Posted on Wed, Oct 7, 2009 : 10:39 a.m.

What's Going Around: Week of Oct. 7

By Jen Eyer

Photo courtesy of Flickr user "itsv"

This is the first in a weekly series looking at what illnesses are circulating among kids in the community.

I checked in with Jan Briggson, practice manager for Child Health Associates, this morning to see what types of illnesses her practice is seeing this week.

She said it's been relatively quiet in the past few days, and that things have slowed down considerably since the start of the school year.

"When kids got back into school and started contaminating each other, we were seeing an influx of flulike illnesses here," Briggson said.

It was busier than usual for the beginning of the year, she said, probably because parents are concerned about swine flu, so they want to have any flu-like illness checked out.

The biggest concern for CHA right now, Briggson said, is getting kids vaccinated for both seasonal flu and novel H1N1 flu virus. They are currently out of seasonal flu vaccine, but expect to receive the rest of their shipment by the end of October. The H1N1 vaccine is expected to arrive in November.

Anecdotally, I can add that a 48-hour virus has been going around my son's daycare in the past couple of weeks. Symptoms are pretty uniform: sudden onset of fever lasting about a day, followed by a period of diarrhea lasting about a day, and then it's over.

Jen Eyer is on the Community Team at AnnArbor.com. She can be reached at 734-623-2577 or jeneyer@annarbor.com, or you can visit her at 301 East Liberty.